YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Switcher (2004)

61 points sammatilda 2 hours ago 13 comments

bix6 1 hour ago | parent

Who did they sell to for the $50k royalty?

gwern 1 hour ago | parent

For perspective, that's >$320k today. For 'switching apps'. It's always kinda crazy to look back and realize how incredibly minute and small programs were back them. Like 'spellcheck' being a project you'd assign half a dozen programmers to or Knuth would write almost a book about.

thechairman12 1 hour ago | parent

Whimsical follow up here: $100k invested in the S&P 500 around 1984 would be $4.5mm today. Thought some people would like to know this as well :)

rjrjrjrj 28 minutes ago | parent

$100k invested in AAPL around 1984 would be worth $329.5M, excluding dividends

At least that’s what ChatGPT says

jakelazaroff 55 minutes ago | parent

One of my favorite programming blogs has a post on exactly that: https://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html

simondotau 44 minutes ago | parent

Despite being small, it probably represents more original thought and engineering insight than many modern apps with 100 times the LOC.

tomhow 1 hour ago | parent

Previously:

Switcher (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32414661 - Aug 2022 (30 comments)

"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637862 - Aug 2010 (110 comments)

Mac OS gets multi-tasking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319308 - May 2010 (7 comments)

defrost 48 minutes ago | parent

For interest searching for "IBM PC Memory Shift software utility 1984" returned no useful hits for the software described that way early on the article.

As a 1980s developer I wonder if that may have been a reference to Borland's Sidekick launched in 1984.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick

Or was Memory Shift an actual TSR swapper I simply never encountered?

CharlesW 28 minutes ago | parent

https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v9n12/82_MemoryShift...

defrost 8 minutes ago | parent

Brilliant, thanks for that - DECEMBER 1983 tracks, there was an explosion of TSR programs and utilities at that time.

joshu 43 minutes ago | parent

i have thunderscan.com and need to get it to andy and/or set it up with something useful

com2kid 41 minutes ago | parent

Reading these types of of stories growing up was always humbling.

I started at Microsoft on the Windows Mobile compiler team, having never taken a compiler class in college. I was surrounded by people who had already done great things, and by the time my career started the glory days of doing real software engineering was already waning.

I got to work with a few of the greats during my time as Microsoft, and I wish I'd taken up an in offer I had to meet Raymond Chen.

Sitting next to people of old school caliber and watching them work is, to use the proper word yet again, humbling as hell.

Fuck your design patterns. These people can debug starting at assembly, and sometimes when that fails they'll debug by pulling out an oscilloscope. Then when that is done they'll build design patterns on top of the foundations they laid themselves.